HandGestures lets you review your flashcards without touching the keyboard or mouse. Pinch your thumb to a finger in front of your webcam and Anki answers the card.
HOW IT WORKS
- On the question side, any pinch shows the answer.
- On the answer side, each finger gives an answer:
Thumb + Index = Good
Thumb + Middle = Again
Thumb + Ring = Hard
Thumb + Pinky = Easy
- Every finger can be remapped to Again / Hard / Good / Easy in the camera window.
- A small colored badge on the card confirms which answer your gesture gave.
GETTING STARTED
- Install the add-on and restart Anki.
- On first start, HandGestures sets up its dependencies automatically. Please wait until it says it is ready.
- Open Tools > HandGestures > Open Camera Monitor and start reviewing.
REQUIREMENTS
- Anki 25.02 or newer
- Windows 10/11 (x64 or ARM) or macOS 11+ (Apple Silicon or Intel)
- A webcam
- About 150-300 MB of free space and an internet connection for the one-time setup
macOS: Anki will ask for camera access the first time. If you denied it, go to System Settings > Privacy & Security > Camera, switch on Anki, and restart Anki.
HOW IT STAYS STABLE
Hand tracking runs in its own separate process with its own private Python runtime, stored inside the add-on's folder. Nothing is installed into Anki itself, so if the camera or tracking ever fails, Anki keeps running and your collection is safe. Anki updates don't break it.
PRIVACY
Your camera video is processed entirely on your computer and is never uploaded or saved. The hand-tracking library (Google MediaPipe) sends anonymous performance and usage metrics to Google; it does not send images or video.
TROUBLESHOOTING
Tools > HandGestures > Diagnostics shows setup details and logs.
Tools > HandGestures > Repair Private Runtime reinstalls the dependencies.
If the camera does not appear, close other apps using it (Zoom, FaceTime, Teams) and try another camera in the camera window.
CREDITS
Google MediaPipe (Apache 2.0), OpenCV (Apache 2.0), uv by Astral (MIT/Apache 2.0).